I have a new hero...

and her name is Soile Lautsi.

Why you might ask?

Well Soile is a portrait of what Europe and moreover its recent EU status pretends to be. A Finnish-born woman who took advantage of the free mobility offered within the union and decided to settle in sunny and warm northern Italy (might ring a bell to some of you reading this).

In the process of settling down into her new community, she integrated even further and began sending her 2 children to a local public school. Of course, being a caring mother she went to the school to meet the teachers and have a closer look at the place where her children would be spending large parts of their day.

Imagine her surprise when she walked into her children's classroom, looked around and saw...the alphabet on the wall, numbers 1-10, student made posters depicting the seasons and the image of a tortured, bloody dead man.

Wait a minute...

Letters? Right...the children are there to learn to read.
Numbers? Right...that whole mathematics thing that people need to master.
Seasons!? Oh ya, science...discovering the world around them.

Tortured and bloody dead man on a cross???

She asked herself, had she enrolled her kids in a how-to-torture seminar? No

A radical Islamic Madrassa? No

A segregated Opus Dei brainwash camp?

No....she had enrolled her children in a public school in a country that dropped Catholicism as the official state religion back in 1984.

She complained and was unfortunately laughed out of courts in Italy who cited laws dating back to the 20's when Mussolini was goose stepping around the Piazzas. Not to be beaten, she persevered all the way to Italy's constitutional court which also subsequently threw out her case.

Where to go from there? Well, she is an 'EU' citizen, right? Well she took her case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights who ruled, obviously, that state schools had to "observe confessional neutrality". They went on, "The presence of the crucifix could easily be interpreted by pupils of all ages as a religious sign, and they would feel that they were being educated in a school environment bearing the stamp of a given religion," ordering the Italian state to pay Lautsi €5,000 (£4,476) in damages."

Before nutters go off in the comments, I do want to stress that by insisting on a religion-free classroom, she is not imposing anything. She doesn't want Sharia law, nor is she expressing that private individuals cannot show their faiths (by wearing headscarves, crosses or yamakas), simply that her rights as a minority are respected as well.

Those of us in Spain know how the PSOE love to portray themselves as more 'modern' than the Berlusconi circus, it will be interesting to see if they pay heed to this ruling and do what they should have a long time ago!

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